THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

into the medical profession under every disadvantage of deficient university culture. The wealth of the Universities and their mastership were so many bonuses on the production of an educated class hostile by sympathy and interest to the aspirations of their fellow-countrymen. The town tradesman lived unregarded in some foul tenement, his trade shrinking and giving out its life in an ever-deepening litany of despair. The labourer starved half the year without wages, without hope, in a hovel less comfortably appointed than the styes of swine. The farmers all lay at the hazard of an angry word from a flint-hearted agent —perhaps from a rent-warner greedy for his fields. To improve or reclaim meant a heavier burden on his back, to be evicted meant destruction—black, instant, and irretrievable. Whatever was spared by oppression was, once in a generation at least, sure to be mown down by famine.

The earth and the fruit thereof were for the delight of a soulless and countryless minority, who applied themselves to be aliens by profession, and stood haughtily aloof from their brother-men in their barrack-rooms and law courts and high-walled pleasure-grounds. Beyond there lay nothing but the armed power of England, two English parties apparently indissolubly united in the policy of repression, and the dumb masses of a British electorate, uninformed, unsympathetic, and immovable. And if Irishmen dared dream of a remedy, whither were they to turn? Not to a Parliament where men who bought their way into Irish constituencies sold them on the open market-place of corruption; not in the wild rush to the arbitrament of the sword, either, glorious though the ambition of perishing amidst the clash of steel rather than of lingering hunger or political corruption. Nec sat rationis in armis—for … continue reading »

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